Ryan Gosling Meme Hits The Campaign Trail

On his way to achieving A-List Hollywood heartthrob status this year, actor Ryan Gosling became an internet meme. Mr. Gosling has a slew of sites devoted to pictures of the actor accompanied by quotes that begin with the phrase “Hey Girl” and depict Mr. Gosling as your ideal boyfriend. “Hey girl, can we just sit and watch the sunset together?” asks one exemplary posting.

Now. Mr. Gosling is the subject of a site that takes this meme to the campaign trail and packs it with backroom terminology and insidery references to voter outreach techniques. “Hey girl, you must be a predictive support model, because my numbers fit perfect against your curves,” reads a typical entry on the Campaign Sick blog.

“Campaign Staff Ryan Gosling” is the brainchild of Nancy Leeds, a former Democratic campaign operative and grad student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs who started posting the pictures on her politics blog, Campaign Sick, about ten days ago. Since then, Ms. Leeds says she’s received about 20,000 visitors and submissions from campaign staffers in “pretty much” every state.

“I am getting a lot of emails. It’s really fun to get all this communication from campaign operatives that I don’t know personally,” Ms. Leeds told The Politicker.

After finishing college in 2006, Ms. Leeds spent four years working on political campaigns prior to entering grad school last year. Ms. Leeds worked for the Colorado Democratic Party, Councilman Brad Lander and David Yassky in his failed 2009 bid to become comptroller.

Ms. Leeds said the inspiration for “Campaign Staff Ryan Gosling” came after she saw friends posting academic variations of the meme on Facebook.

“My friends in law school and my friends in med school were sending me theirs and I thought so much innuendo around campaigns

Pictures on Ms. Leeds’ site show Mr. Gosling working in a variety of campaign roles.

“Sometimes he’s a field operator, sometimes he works in finance, but mostly he does field work,” said Ms. Leeds.

Because of this focus on field work, Ms. Leeds said most of her audience are Democratic staffers.

“I’ve gotten some, maybe tangential interest from Republicans,” Ms. Leeds said. “We tend to run campaigns differently. Democrats are a lot more field heavy and most of the jokes are about community organizing. That’s mostly a Democrat thing.”